<html><head><title>This is Picture Bank</title></head>
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<h2 align=center>Picture Bank</h2>
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<img src=relationships.png align=right valign=top alt="relationships between the components of Picture Bank">
<p>Picture Bank is a collection of Perl scripts intended to allow you to create lexical associations between directories by giving them searchable terms and keywords which would be cumbersome and slow if you were to do so by  using them in the directory names.</p><p>  This was created with the observation in mind that people tend to organise files in directories of related content, however as collections or archives grow, the system (if there even was one) can soon become swamped and files become hard to find, especially if new directories are being created to accomodate nuances of variation in content, or where content may fit into more than one category.</p>
<p>Picture Bank does this by creating a directory listing (a "map" file) to which you add the searchable terms and keywords you require.  For large collections, searching this is (should be!) a lot faster than a full directory search.</p>
<p>As its name suggests, Picture Bank deals primarily with graphics files.  It can use existing thumbnails provided they are either:<ul>
<li>In an appropriately named sub-directory whose name contains the string "thumb"</li>
<li>Have the prefix th or tn, followed by a non-alphanumeric character</li>
<li>Have the suffix th or tn, followed by a non-alphanumeric character</li>
</ul>
If there is a different number of thumbnails to actual files, it will try to either create a thumbnail at the right point, according to the naming convention already in use, or notify the user if a thumbnail exists where there is no original file.  As it doesn't actually care what type of file you want to deal with, if you want to use the thumbnail facility with non-graphics files you will need to create a set of images to accompany them.  Picture Bank is intended to to be able to use a default image for non-graphics files (not implemented yet).</p>
<p>Picture Bank is in a pre-alpha state at the moment, so not everything works or has been fully tested, and there are no doubt some glaring security holes!  You are invited to examine the work so far, and try it out for yourself.</p>
<p>Read the html index here <a href=PB/index.html>index</a><br>
Examine the script that facilitates administration functions <a href=PB/admin.pl>admin.pl</a><br>
Examine the script that enables searching <a href=PB/search.pl>search.pl</a><br>
Examine the script that allows editing of the &quot map&quot file <a href=PB/edit.pl>edit.pl</a><br>
Examine the script that gives a thumbnailed content listing <a href=PB/thumbs.pl>thumbs.pl</a><br>
Examine the script that gives the final output - the file viewer <a href=PB/pages.pl>pages.pl</a><br></p>

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